Jack vance, p.4
Outlaw, page 4
‘I’m out!’ shouted Lucy, the slide locked back in her gun.
‘Forget it!’ Marc yelled back. ‘Just hold tight and hope!’
‘What . . .?’
Marc pitched up the front wheel and sent the Aprilia into a bouncing side-slip, going through an opening between two support beams that took them from the northbound track to the southbound side. The move put them directly in the path of an oncoming train, the brilliant white glare of its lights dazzling them both. In less than sixty seconds, it would strike them head-on.
He gambled on the ALEPH gunman coming after them, and the bet paid off. The mercenary was so fixated on running down Marc and Lucy, he put his own safety a distant second.
Marc pumped the brakes and veered back the way they had come, bouncing across to the other side of the tracks. Blinded by the oncoming train, their pursuer reacted too slowly, and the southbound train clipped him, smashing man and moped into the tunnel wall with an ugly, grinding crunch of metal.
‘Oh, damn,’ said Lucy, around a shallow cough. ‘He won’t walk away from that.’
‘Speaking of walking . . .’ Ahead of them, the other train had stopped in St-Michel, blocking their route. The Aprilia came to a halt in a crunch of gravel. ‘We need to ditch this.’
‘Copy that.’
She helped him dump the scooter into a maintenance arch. They both stripped off the dark, nondescript jackets they had been wearing, revealing brighter, louder clothing below, more suited to tourists. Marc pulled a khaki baseball cap from his pocket and put it on backwards, while Lucy threw a thin denim shirt over her shoulders.
It wasn’t much of a change, but it modified their look enough that anyone with their descriptions would need to take a second glance to be sure. As passengers moved off and onto the waiting train, it was easy for the two of them to walk up the access ramp to the platform and get lost in their movement.
Staying close to each other, but not enough to seem as if they were a couple, Marc and Lucy followed the other passengers towards the exit. Every instinct screamed at Marc to get out of there as fast as possible, but a hurried step or a furtive manner would make them stand out a mile to any watchers observing the platforms via closed-circuit television.
Then everyone stopped moving. A voice came over the station’s public address system and told them that there had been ‘an incident’. The station was being evacuated, and the voice asked for everyone to be patient and remain calm.
A ripple of sullen, city-dweller irritation washed over the crowd, and Marc kept his expression neutral as a group of police officers appeared at the exit. The cops scanned the faces of the passengers as they threaded by them, and his pulse quickened again, the momentary adrenaline drop after ditching the scooter fading.
There was nowhere else to go. The train in the station had stalled, its doors open wide, and the platform exits were thick with cops. Their window of opportunity to escape was closing by the second.
Do they have our faces?
It was likely, Marc decided, both of them caught on traffic cameras or monitors inside the Métro. But not much time had passed, and it was doubtful that any pictures of them had yet been sent for a facial recognition pass through the Paris police’s databases.
When that did happen, the flics would see the Interpol alerts next to their names and the warnings that tagged Marc and Lucy on counter-terror watch lists. All hell would break loose.
A hand grabbed Marc’s arm as two of the policemen came closer, another snaking up and around the back of his neck. He had no time to react before Lucy pressed herself into him and pulled Marc into a hungry, open-mouthed kiss. A shock flashed through him. For a second their connection was electric, it was fire. He gave into it.
Then just as fast, Lucy disengaged and slapped Marc hard across the cheek.
‘Comment osez-vous?’ she snapped, with an arch sniff, plucking a pair of large sunglasses from her pocket and turning away to put them on.
Marc coloured, suddenly aware of the two cops laughing at his expense. Then they were moving away, with Marc on the escalator, rising towards daylight.
Outside, he blinked in the sun’s glare and turned around the peak of his cap to shade his eyes. He found Lucy a few metres away, at the kerbside by the river, waiting with a taxi already attracted by her summons. She gave him a look and beckoned.
‘C’mon.’
‘What was that about?’ he said, as they climbed into the vehicle.
‘Distraction,’ she replied. ‘Those cops will remember you getting slapped, but not what we looked like.’
‘Yeah.’ Marc rubbed his cheek. ‘Give me some warning next time?’
She smiled as the taxi pulled away.
‘Don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it.’
THREE
Lucy rode the bus a stop past the Parc de Noisiel, then walked back as if she’d planned to do that all along. It was the last in a line of three stages, changing from a taxi to public transport, varying her path to put off any potential followers.
Washing her route was old school spycraft. It had become practically second nature to her, since she’d moved from the straightforward work of being a sniper for Uncle Sam to the more clandestine gig of a covert security operative. But on some level, this spook shit grated on her.
Lucy Keyes had found her rhythm in the world as a soldier, in the green machine where targets were designated and rules of engagement were clear. A million miles from the backstreets of Queens in New York where she’d grown up, in the army she found the thing that her life had lacked up to that point – focus. She liked the precision, the way it echoed her work with her weapon. Find the target, lock in the range, put the cross hairs in the right place and then – send it. Mission accomplished. Move on to the next one.
Spy work was something else entirely, hard on you in a way that regular soldiering never was. Being a covert meant never coming home from the fight. It meant you were carrying your battlefield around with you wherever you went, because every person giving you a cautious glance could be the enemy, no matter what they looked like or how they dressed. Lucy had been conditioned to the idea combat was there and safety was here, and a line existed between the two.
She’d learned a different reality coming to work for Ekko Solomon and the Rubicon Group. Some days, she wished that the enigmatic African had left her to mark time in the cell at the military stockade where he first found her.
That thought made Lucy’s lip curl in a sneer.
Are you crazy?
She asked herself the question. She would have still been there now, prowling the bounds of the prison, getting softer, growing more bitter by the day.
Lucy crossed the road in front of the low cluster of vacant office buildings, jogging up to the side entrance that appeared, to all intents and purposes, bolted shut. The windows of the bottom floor were boarded up with sheets of thick, rain-stained plywood, and the levels above were dark, the blank glass layered with sheets of opaque blue plastic. It was a careful disguise designed to give off the impression that no one was in residence.
The offices had belonged to a company that had crashed and burned during the long months of the coronavirus lockdown, and ownership of the place had been lost in the cracks of the system. In the suburbs of Torcy, in Seine-et-Marne out to the east of the French capital, it was close enough to the Combine’s holdings for the team to react quickly, and hopefully far enough out that their targets wouldn’t find it if they looked.
With few entrance and exit routes and good lines of fire that Lucy herself had validated, it was perfect for a staging area, the kind of blandly ordinary building that slipped past the eye and didn’t lodge in the memory.
She paused at the side entrance, checking to be sure no one saw her slip inside. A keypad got her access, and she waited for the door’s magnetic lock to snap closed before she moved on. Above her, concealed out of sight, a compact thermal camera kept watch on the doorway and the street outside. Had Lucy been a stranger, she would not have got this far.
She took the stairs to the third floor in quick, loping steps, taking pains to avoid the tripwires set up with nine-banger stun grenades attached, there to catch any intruder who made it past the first line of security.
The upper floor of the building had formerly been a field of office cubicles but now it was a wide open space, split up by a few round pillars. One corner of the floor was a couple of makeshift dorms, curtained off from one another with more of that blue plastic sheeting, and in the centre there was something approximating an operations deck.
Most of the tables and chairs were cheap, off-the-shelf camping kit and plastic garden furniture, along with a threadbare old sofa they’d found in a storeroom.
At one end of the set-up, a thin East Asian woman in a blood-red hoodie sat in a semicircle of computer monitors and laptops, nesting over a black snarl of cables emerging from a military specification gear case. Kara Wei’s expressionless features were lit by the cold glow from her screens, her large eyes dancing as she lost herself in infinite lines of computer code. She didn’t look up as Lucy approached.
‘What went wrong?’ she demanded.
‘The situation was fluid.’ Lucy’s reply was equally terse. ‘We had to bug out early.’
She left it at that, irked at the hacker’s monotone accusation.
Over the past six months, Lucy and Kara had barely had a conversation longer than a couple of sentences. It was a long way from the relationship they used to have – a friendship after a fashion, a mutual respect for each other’s skill set between sniper and hacker. But that was before Kara had used Rubicon’s assets for her own personal agenda and put the team in harm’s way. Ultimately, a lot of secrets had come to light about Kara – hell, that wasn’t even her real name, Lucy reflected – and a lot of trust had burned up.
Lucy was still salty about that. The woman she had thought was her friend was a mask the real Kara wore, a persona to pretend with, for someone ill-at-ease with human contact. The individual underneath was someone more calculating, and Lucy hated that she had been fooled.
But the hacker was one of the best in the game, and when the SCD team were scattered and lost following the collapse of the Rubicon Group, she had shown up to help them. Perhaps that counted for something.
Months later, Kara was still here, still helping them. But it was hard to let go of the resentment.
The hacker raised her head.
‘I lost the remote feed from the laser mike so I have next to nothing. If you’ve come back empty-handed, that’s going to make things even more difficult.’
‘I’m fine, thanks for asking,’ Lucy snapped, and she poked a finger through the bullet hole in the baggy arm of her blouse.
Kara gave a shrug, as if she didn’t understand the statement.
‘Where’s Marc?’
‘On his way.’ Her exasperation from the blown surveillance operation suddenly boiled up to the surface. ‘I’m sure he’s looking forward to your heart-warming welcome.’
‘Let’s take a breath.’ A broad-shouldered man with short hair and kind eyes appeared in the opposite doorway, drawn by the rise in Lucy’s tone. ‘We’re on the same side here.’ He had his hands out in front of him, in a conciliatory gesture, as if physically pushing air into the space between the two women.
Benjamin Harun was on the opposite end of the spectrum from Kara in every conceivable manner. French, welcoming, and the dictionary definition of the word ‘burly’, Marc had once described the ex-Foreign Legion paratrooper as built like a brick shithouse, and it was accurate. Lucy preferred to think of him like those cartoon caricatures of an old-time circus strongman, lifting black iron barbells with one thick arm and twirling his well-cared-for moustache with his free hand.
Like Lucy, he had been a soldier, but Benjamin had given that up after losing too much in dusty, desolate war zones. She knew for a fact he hadn’t touched a gun in years, and he’d come into Rubicon’s orbit to work as the resident therapist and counsellor for the company team. Right now, he was the stabilising influence the survivors needed.
‘Sure,’ said Lucy, to no one in particular, as she moved to the part of the room set up as a basic kitchen. She helped herself to a bottle of water from a humming mini-fridge and microwaved a packet of instant rice. The comedown from the operation had two side-effects: first, it made her ravenously hungry; and second, it killed the giddy rush of excitement she felt in the moment. In the action, she could almost be having fun, but afterwards the cold, hard reality seeped back in.
‘Where is Marc?’ Benjamin trailed after her, raising an eyebrow.
‘We separated,’ she noted. ‘After everything went to hell, figured it was the smart play to avoid any potential tails.’
‘Were you tracked?’ Kara called out the question and Lucy ignored it.
‘He’ll be here,’ Lucy continued.
‘We can collapse this site and fall back to our alternate in thirty minutes,’ said the Frenchman. ‘If you believe we are compromised.’
Lucy’s gaze drifted to another of the black plastic gear cases. Inside were their meagre stocks of weapons and ammunition. She visualised a potential attack scenario, with ALEPH gun-hands swarming the abandoned building.
They could shoot their way out if they needed to. She’d picked this place precisely because of that.
She shook her head. ‘We’ll stay on station. Marc will be coming here, and so will Malte when his plane gets in.’
Benjamin gave her a nod. ‘Malte checked in an hour ago. He’s leaving Hong Kong in the morning.’
‘And?’ Lucy couldn’t hide the hope in her voice. After the fuck-up earlier, she was desperate to get some good news.
‘Successful,’ said Benjamin, in a passable imitation of the other man’s voice.
She released a breath. ‘Good. That’s real good.’
Malte Riis, the team’s taciturn Finnish wheelman, had taken on a solo sortie to connect with an old Rubicon source in the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and after months of foreplay the contact had finally given up the intelligence they needed.
No one wanted to talk about how much the data had cost them. The war chest the team had started with months ago had been depleted far quicker than anyone expected, and it wouldn’t be much longer before they were running on fumes.
Lucy sat in one of the lawn chairs, placing her Sig Sauer on a folding table beside her, and set in on the pack of hot rice, spooning it into her mouth and chewing mechanically.
‘We have other options,’ Benjamin said, at length.
‘We really don’t,’ she said, her mouth full. ‘We all committed to the job. You were there. We knew there would come a moment like this. The go or no-go.’
‘We passed that point weeks ago.’ Kara threw in the comment from across the room, making no attempt to pretend she wasn’t listening to their conversation.
Lucy’s lip curled.
She’s right, damn it.
Benjamin could have agreed, but that wasn’t his way. The Frenchman preferred to let people come to the truth on their own.
Lucy’s sense memory snapped her back to that morning at a desolate airstrip on the coast of Mozambique, where the survivors of the Rubicon cull had gathered in the wake of their defeat. Still reeling from the shock of losing everything they had, still burning with the sorrow and rage from the deaths of three of their own, it came down to the choice they had made on that day.
With pretty much nothing but the clothes on their backs, a few guns and a bag of encrypted hard drives, the last remnants of the Special Conditions Division had traded their futures for a shot at something that seemed impossible. Vengeance.
All of them, in one way or another, owed Ekko Solomon their lives. The African had brought them back from the brinks of their personal abysses, given them purpose and agency. There was a bill to come due.
Lucy wanted to believe that their goal was in reach, but she couldn’t lie to herself. It had cost half a million euros in digital currency and gigabytes of data in trade to place Marc and Lucy across the street from the Combine’s meeting today, in the right city on the right day at the right time.
And what do we have to show for it?
‘Door,’ Kara said abruptly.
‘What?’ Lucy’s head snapped up, and she reached for the Sig.
‘Someone at the door,’ Kara repeated, as if she were explaining herself to a slow child. She indicated one of her monitors. ‘Marc’s back.’
Lucy put down the gun and sighed. A few moments later, the Brit emerged from the stairwell looking worn-out and wary. His eyes flicked around the room, instinctively checking the exit routes and the corners where hidden threats might lurk.
She wondered if Marc realised the changes in himself. The first time Lucy had seen him, through the scope of a PSG-1 sniper rifle, Marc had been all raw energy and instinct, running on smarts and luck and not much else. Surviving had tempered him, knocked off the rough corners, turned him into something different. He still had that reckless streak, though, and a tendency to overthink things.
He pulled out a sliver of black plastic – the memory stick from the surveillance gear – and tossed it to Kara. The hacker snatched it from the air like a cat snagging a bird, and made a face.
‘This is all you brought back? What about the equipment? The truck?’ She inserted the data stick into her laptop and ran a scan on it. ‘You know it took me two weeks to source it.’
‘Had to leave everything behind.’ Marc shot Lucy a look, intuiting what discussion had already taken place. ‘ALEPH didn’t give us much choice, yeah?’
‘Do you want to know how much money you’ve burned today?’ Kara said flatly.
Marc’s jaw hardened. ‘Is that going to help our mission?’
Kara swallowed any comment she was going to make and returned to checking the content of the memory stick. Audio files from the laser mike stuttered from a concealed speaker as she ran the data through filtering subroutines.
